Trump in lead at 40.6 percent

When Donald Trump announced his campaign for President last summer, the Republican establishment treated him, a longtime liberal showman, as a joke.

“I’m a dealmaker who will get things done”, he said Thursday during an event in Las Vegas.

“We need a new George Washington”, Beck said at the rally. And, once we do, the establishment will have one last chance to save its Party. Which is why, for comedy purposes, I’m rooting for the senator from Texas to grab the nomination.

The establishment’s problem is that its view of Trump and Cruz is not shared by its voters.

Trump continued to lead the pack of Republican presidential candidates this week with 37.4 percent support nationally, according to the HuffPost Pollster average of opinion polls. The fact that they see (or at least have resigned themselves to) a fast-talking, vulgar racist xenophobe with not-particularly-conservative principles as a viable person to represent the United States on the world stage is both pitiful and the one-sentence summary of a potentially hilarious movie satire.

With the Iowa Caucus just 10 days away, the leading 2016 presidential candidates are taking their battlesto the television airwaves.

They are telling pollsters Trump is their man.

Inside this barren, dimly-lit community center, a fast-talking Ted Cruz chose to play a bit of offense Saturday evening.

So this is partly an act of self-preservation for the GOP.

Trump and Cruz have been engaged in an increasingly hostile war of words as they battle for a win in first-to-vote Iowa, where polls show an increasingly narrow race.

Mr Cruz blasted Mr Trump’s past reluctance to strip money from Planned Parenthood and cast the billionaire’s plan to deport more than 11 million people who are in country illegally as “amnesty” because he would then let many of them return. And that would be hilarious.

Trump has lead in most polls for months.

Indeed, Cruz’s ad called eminent domain a “fancy term for politicians seizing private property to enrich the fat cats who bankroll them”. That’s a good question.

“Angry” Republican voters go for Trump over Cruz by a 49-22 percent margin. Trump has a few long-running themes and bugaboos, but has been all over the map on nearly everything and sometimes will meander from one position to another within the same answer, in keeping with his lack of ideological anchor (and limited knowledge of policy). This lopsided election defeat might help Democrats make some gains in the House and retake the Senate. He’s third in Iowa behind Cruz and Trump. His winning the nomination would surely cripple the GOP with minority voters, widen the gender gap among women (which already favors Democrats), and make the party look ridiculous by nominating a figure so clearly unqualified to be president. And with four more years of an opposition party trying to block every function of government under a Democratic president staring us in the face, with gridlock certain to stymie and frustrate every effort at passing any needed legislation at all well into the future, we’ll need to take our entertainment and our joy wherever we can find it.